If you're interested in reading papers outside of your area of expertise, this is what I'd recommend. Firstly, don't read the paper from front to back. Contemporary journal articles are way too dry for that and you likely don't care about all of the sections (eg, the experimental methods).
Read the abstract to determine if you are actually interested in what the paper is going to discuss. The abstract will also give you a decent idea of who the writer considers to be their audience; if the abstract is completely and totally over your head, you're not likely to understand most of the paper.
After that, you can skim the introduction to get a grasp of the context (and read any introductory subsections that you aren't familiar with or are fascinated by).
In my field (and many/most others?), the story is generally told through figures of data and their captions. Generally, you can inspect the figures and captions and get a very good idea of what the paper is saying and what they're basing their conclusions on. You can jump to parts of the discussion section if you want more information than the captions are providing.
The conclusions section ties it all together, but too often that section is just a wordier restatement of the abstract. The conclusions are also where you're most likely to find the speculative crap that excites journalists and potential sources of funding.
If you're really into the topic, or it's in your field, you can dive in and read the sections that interest you, but a well crafted scientific paper should be able to tell the whole story through the figures and captions.